Scans_Daily

Bringing the crack since December 2003

Incredible Hulks #616; Ant-Man & the Wasp #1

I have absolutely no idea what's going on with Tim Seeley's Hack/Slash anymore. First it went off on this really long, weird story about Golden Age superhero sidekicks which lasted for approximately fifty years without stopping, then the ongoing stopped coming out, then there were a bunch of limited series and one-shots, and now it's relaunching at Image. I don't get it. (This kind of thing is why I never got into Grendel.)

That aside, Seeley is apparently doing a bunch of work for Marvel now, some of which came out this week. He wrote a short in the back of this week's Incredible Hulks, and wrote and penciled the first issue of the Hank Pym & Eric O'Grady buddy comedy Ant-Man & The Wasp.

The first couple of pages from Ant-Man & Wasp entertain me on a sort of meta-level. Hank is filming a public service announcement.

"Hi, I'm Hank Pym. One time about thirty years ago, I was going insane and I slapped my wife. Since then, I've been through eighteen different superheroic identities, led two different teams of Avengers, saved the world six or eight times, died twice, came back to life twice, resurrected my wife, banged a robot, and prevented the alien takeover of Earth.

"Please, if you would be so kind, shut the fuck up about me hitting Jan."

Meanwhile, over in Incredible Hulks, Bruce and Jen have spotted a disturbance out in the middle of the desert. The Armadillo's in a fight with a bunch of dorks on ATVs, who're apparently some kind of thrill-seeking vigilantes. While Bruce fights the Armadillo, Jen goes off to figure out what's going on.

The pencils are by noted girlie pin-up artist Al Rio, who's really expanded his portfolio. He started off as sort of a J. Scott Campbell clone, but he's gotten some Bryan Hitch influences and the storytelling here is much cleaner than some of his other work I've seen. It's nice to see he's improving.

I genuinely didn't like Hank long before I found out about the hitting incident - the first time I encountered him was in West Coast Avengers (and I didn't read the old Avengers stories until later on). So not everyone thinks he's a douche due to the one incident.

Having said that, the version they've got on the new Avengers cartoon is a version I'm finding very likeable, and I know I'll miss him when he inevitably leaves the lineup soon (since they're mirroring the original comic's lineup order).

Well, that's Marvel. Their crew are largely stereotyped according to old storylines, whether or not the traits from those storylines still apply.

The running gag about Tony is that he's an alcoholic when he hasn't touched the sauce since 1986. The running gag about Hank is that he's a wife-beater, when he hit Jan exactly once in 1980 and has been living it down ever since.

Well, part of that is because Tony, like several other characters, kind of gets rebooted periodically. The whole 'Heroes Return' universe thing, several animated series and so forth. The whole wife beating thing became a focus of Hank's character thanks to the Ultimates comic and animated series. I know a lot of people dropped The Ultimates right when Hank does his 'why you make me gotta hurt you, baby' bit. Didn't hurt sales, apparently, but it caused some of us to bail.

That's kind of the problem with a lot of characters, both at Marvel and DC. Many of the people writing the current stories take some facts as 'shared wisdom' regardless of how accurate they actually are. Hank acted like a dick for a few issues, chewed his wife out and then had a breakdown, slapped his wife and then hatched a crazy scheme to show he wasn't an ineffectual goof. It backfired terribly and he's never truly lived it down.

Marvel's characters have been stuck in loops since the early 1980s. It used to be that they moved ever forward; now they just run in place.

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